1 Elisabeth M. Yang-Young Scholars Award Elisabeth M. Yang Constructing the “Moral” Infant in American Medical and Scientific Discourse, 1850s-1920s “Are children simply good natured—or not? Can a child be born a bad seed? Discussions about the morality of babies—whether they are born good or bad—and the ways to develop that morality trace back to the time of Plato and are easily found in today’s blogs, websites, newspapers, magazines, and popular books. While historians, sociologists, and literary scholars have written extensively on the history of child-rearing and the history of pediatrics very little has been done that focuses on the history of infants—which I define as children aged 0-2—as moral beings. (Figure 1) In this paper, I explore the philosophical and social constructions of the moral infant in American medical and scientific discourse from the 1850s-1920s by examining medical journals and textbooks, and child-rearing manuals intended for middle class white women and authored by medical experts . This paper is part of a larger project that traces the history of the moral infant as imagined by physicians, scientists, and child-rearing authorities, examining the ways in which science, religion, politics, class, gender, and race intersect and manifest in medical advice literature that rapidly gained popularity in Victorian America in the 1840s. I argue that beginning at this time there is a shift in the image or what Deborah Lupton and Barry Glassner describe as the “fabrication” of “moral” infants from that of ethereal embodied spirits to pre-moral, conscious machines. 1 Here, Elizabeth Goodenough’s notion of “islanding childhood” is helpful, allowing 1. Deborah Lupton and Barry Glassner cited in Simon J. Williams, “The Biomedical Body: Reductionism, Constructionism and Beyond,” in Medicine and the Body (London: Sage, 2003), 7-8.